Love Me, Love My Dog

I am a vegetarian myself. But I can’t help but notice that a great many people who are vegetarians and animal lovers are not terribly to other people.

Love for animals can become a substitute for love for one’s fellow man, and kindness to animals can be used to justify cruelty to humans. Animals, in the end, are easier to love, because they can be controlled and do not challenge one’s ego.

Hitler was a vegetarian. This was not, it seems purely for medical reasons, as some have claimed. Albert Speer reports that “he would often make fun of meateaters… If there were a meat broth I could depend on his speaking of ‘corpse tea’; in connection with crayfish he brought out his story of a deceased grandmother whose relations had thrown her body into the brook to lure the crustaceans; for eels, that they were best fattened and caught by using dead cats.” –Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 411.

And he was an animal lover. Speer says that his Alsatian Blondi “probably occupied the most important role in Hitler’s private life; he meant more to his master than the Fuehrer’s closest associates.” (ibid, p. 410. Any “reasonably prudent visitor,” Speer reports, avoided arousing any feelings of friendship in the dog. For Hitler was jealous of its affections.

This rings true. Psychopaths love animals, because they can be so completely under one’s control. Ceausescu and Caligula were also notable animal lovers.